Allan Bloom: Response to Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man

by: Allan Bloom

Topics: Allan Bloom, Francis Fukuyama, End of History, Last Man, Alexander Kojeve, Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, Heidegger, Nihilism, Liberalism, Liberal Democracy, Hegel, Karl Marx, Capitalism, Communism, Philosophy, Raymond Aron

Collection: opensource

Language: English

Allan Bloom's analysis of the incoherence of Fukuyama's popular & popularized hypothesis after the fall of the Soviet Union and collapse of the Warsaw pact.
Bloom shows that Fukuyama has synthesized two notions derived from the thought of Nietzsche and Hegel which contradict one another, forming a nonsensical, not to say highly unpolitical, picture of our situation. Fukuyama seems to celebrate and deplore the victory of liberal democracy in the same breath. There is also a brief discussion of the place of Alexander Kojeve as the father of Fukuyama's perspective. The analysis of Fukuyama's hypothesis recalls Bloom's marvelous discussion of Raymond Aron, a great liberal thinker, whose temper was genuinely political and prudent.